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Darksiders Post-mortem Interview

GameSpy: Yeah, I was gonna ask about that, because at the end of the first Darksiders, it heavily implies multiplayer in a sequel...

David Adams: It's definitely a direction we've always wanted to take the franchise.

GameSpy: It only makes sense with four Horsemen.

David Adams: Yeah. When we first thought about it, we said,"Man, you've got to be able to play all four Horsemen, play with your buddies..." We kind of imagined that same action-adventure gameplay, but co-op, which has never really been done. It was good for us to step back and say, "Okay, let's just make an action-adventure first."

GameSpy: Was that a pretty early decision?

David Adams: Yeah. That was the first thing we cut. We said, "Yeah, we can't do that." I mean there were six of us in the studio at the time, too.

GameSpy: I liked the way that Darksiders walks this really good line between being a hack-and-slash sort of action game, but at the same time there are all these instances where you won't even fight anything for an hour because you'll be taking care of a really complex dungeon puzzle. Was this something that you learned from other action games? I know you said you hadn't ever really played God of War, but it seems like all these little things that have come to be annoying in other games, like quick time events, your team took the time to simplify.

David Adams: That is one thing we did. Obviously, when we played God of War, we thought, "Yeah, we've got to have some sort of quick-kill animations." But in the context of our game it didn't make sense to do it like God of War. So we wanted to have the same visual coolness to it, but without the actual quick time event. I'd say probably the biggest thing, though, this we got from a lot of different games, is just pacing. The games I love the most, at least, are the ones where you're not doing the same thing back to back to back. That's what we wanted the game to play out like. It might be a puzzle one minute, then there might be melee combat the next, then you might be shooting a gun the next. Keep the experience fresh, keep them always guessing what they're gonna do around the next corner. That was our goal.

GameSpy: In terms of the game's setting, is there a reason that you went with the vaguely Judeo-Christian, angels, demons, Four Horsemen sort of theme?

David Adams: That's funny, because we went through a lot of different characters... I mean, at one point our main character was a kid with a big robotic arm. If you know anything about Joe Mad's art... you'll notice War also has a big arm. And then we just, we were thinking about pitching it to publishers, and we thought, "Man, no publisher is gonna bite on this, even though it could be a cool game."

GameSpy: You knew the kind of game you wanted to make, but as far as the story and the use of evil, dark, demons, angels, etc. -- that came later?

David Adams: Yeah, that came, that was just sorta like... we were trying to sex it up a little bit. Our creative director, Joe Madureira, just on the way home one day thought, "What about the Four Horsemen?" We said, "Yeah, that's awesome." That's just about it. We didn't even really think of it in religious terms, we just thought that the Four Horsemen are cool, angels and demons are cool, let's make a game out of that.

GameSpy: As far as the more elaborate enemies that you fight, the bat queen and the spider, was that stuff that you designed for the game? When I played it I thought, "This almost seems like someone drew this badass bat thing and said, 'We need to find some way to put this in the game.'"

David Adams: Yeah. That's kind of how it works. We're very game-centric, so we just think of something cool and then we do our best to work it in. Even the story, people ask, "How'd you come up with the story?" We actually plotted the game out first, how we wanted it to play out, what we wanted the player to do. Then we wrote the story.

GameSpy: Oh, really? So you had the idea of, player will do X, Y, and Z -- the basic archetype of the story -- but the themes and stuff all came later?

David Adams: Exactly. And then you think you want to do this and this, then at some point you come up with Samuel and the quest for the hearts. We kind of back-filled a lot of that. We take sort of a game-centric design, and also a cool-centric design, too. The bosses are good examples. It's funny you mention the bat queen, because I did all the boss fights, but that boss fight wasn't planned before the drawing, he just drew a cool bat guy. I said, "Man, that's awesome, I can totally make a boss fight around that."

GameSpy: So was Darksiders always envisioned as a franchise, rather than just the single game?

David Adams: Yeah, definitely. I guess it was kind of presumptuous of us, but we always mentally assumed we would make at least two or three of them. But we'll see, it depends on how well it does. That's always been our aspiration, for sure.

GameSpy: Now that you've finished Darksiders, is the studio going to be switching to the Warhammer 40K MMO that you guys are known to be working on? Is that gonna take priority over working on a future Darksiders game?

David Adams: There's a lot of people that have still been working on 40K. But we're brewing other stuff as well. 40K, obviously that's a big, giant game that we have to make -- a lot of attention has shifted to that. But we're not gonna stop console development, at heart that was what we wanted to do when we formed Vigil.